Effective Multi-Tenant Distributed Systems

Chapter 1. Introduction to Multi-Tenant Distributed Systems

The Benefits of Distributed Systems

The past few decades have seen an explosion of computing power. Search engines, social networks, cloud-based storage and computing, and similar services now make seemingly infinite amounts of information and computation available to users across the globe.

The tremendous scale of these services would not be possible without distributed systems. Distributed systems make it possible for many hundreds or thousands of relatively inexpensive computers to communicate with one another and work together, creating the outward appearance of a single, high-powered computer. The primary benefit of a distributed system is clear: the ability to massively scale computing power relatively inexpensively, enabling organizations to scale up their businesses to a global level in a way that was not possible even a decade ago.

Performance Problems in Distributed Systems

As more and more nodes are added to the distributed system and interact with one another, and as more and more developers write and run applications on the system, complications arise. Operators of distributed systems must address an array of challenges that affect the performance of the system as a whole as well as individual applications’ performance.

These performance challenges are different from those faced when operating a data center of computers that are running more or less independently, such as a web server farm. In a true distributed ...